Eighty Years Ago This Week

  President Roosevelt announced that General Dwight Eisenhower would have supreme command of the allied invasion of Europe in 1944. He had been chosen as much for his diplomatic as his military gifts; his status as commander of the British forces involved, most especially the willful General Montgomery, would have to be handled with great tact. Most of his immediate subordinates were British. His appointment set the seal of public recognition on US predominance in the war effort. Distasteful though it was to many British people, the US was the senior partner in the alliance already contribtuing larger forces and hugely greater industrial resources. In the last major naval engagement fought purely between surface vessels, the Scharnhorst was sunk in the Battle of North Cape. She was heavily shelled by the battleship Duke of York and cruiser Belfast then finished off by torpedoes from destroyers. The British had the advantage of accurate intelligence on her movements and greatly s...

  The northernmost of the sequence of German defensive "winter" lines in Italy rested on the Adriatic port city Ortona. The crossing of the Sangro futher south had been relatively easy but the Germans defended Ortona ferociously against the Canadian 1st Infantry Division. The house-to-house fighting was especially bloody and Ortona came to be called the Stalingrad of Italy. After liberating Kyiv the previous month, the Red Army was subjected to a ferocious German counter-attack. The Soviets were able to send urgent reinforcements to the front which halted the Germans but the two armies had fought each other to a standstill. Each had suffered heavy casualties but neither had achieved a major strategic victory in which major opposing formations were eliminated. The German army was firmly on the back-foot but still a formidable opponent. RAF Bomber Command suffered what came to be called Black Thursday when it mounted a raid on Berlin as part of AM Harris's campaign to destr...

      The Turkish president Inonu met Roosevelt and Churchill in Cairo. The British flooded the media with reports suggesting that Turkey would soon be coming into the war on the allied side but these were spurious. Churchill entertained fantasies that  Turkey's entry into the war would revive his scheme for a full-scale attack on the Balkans which had been scotched by the active opposition of Stalin and the scepticism of Roosevelt at the Teheran conference. In reality Turkish neutrality was a sounder option for all concerned. German divisions were tied up protecting Bulgaria from opportunistic seizure by Turkey. Providing the Turkish armed forces with modern equipment would have drained allied resources for no immediate benefit. The Czechoslovak government-in-exile signed a treaty with the Soviet Union grandiloquently named Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Collaboration. The Czechs hoped to escpe the fate of Poland where the Soviets were running their own alternative...

    Churchill personally presented the 'Sword of Stalingrad' to Stalin at the Soviet embassy in Teheran in front of dignitaries and a military guard from each nation. The sword was a gift of George VI honouring the people of the city for their resistance; it had become an emblem of the intense sovophilia across British society which Evelyn Waugh later derided in his Sword Of Honour trilogy. Both leaders were visibly moved and Stalin kissed the sword. However Stalin and his interpreter spoke so inaubly that no-one could understand what he meant to say. Supposedly he expressed the deep appreciation of the Russian people for the honourable gesture of their British comrades. The acute shortage of labour for the mines could not be solved by voluntary measures and the Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin announced that there would be compulsion. One in ten men drafted into service would be sent to the mines rather than the armed forces. The men would be chosen by ballot. They would be p...

  For the first time since becoming dictator of the Soviet Union, Stalin left its territory, albeit only to travel the short distance to  Teheran which had been under Soviet occupation since the previous year. The summit meeting with Roosevelt and Churchill discussed the invasion of France to which the US and Britan were now committed in 1944.  Stalin's vision of the post-war world was endorsed by the agreement to transfer much of eastern Poland to Soviet republics; Poland would be compensated by redrawing its western frontier at the expense of Germany. Stalin commited himself in principal to declaring war on Japan once Germany was defeated. In all the Stalin-inspired clamour for a second front, it had been sedulously ignored that Britain and the US were shielding the Soviet eastern frontier by their campaigns against Japan. The preparation for the debate on the King's speech to Parliament provoked a flurry of proposed amendments to the government's programme. The...